In November I published a post highlighting an exciting new UNAIDS campaign called #PreventionRevolution that sought to capitalize on the power of Social Media Networks to help raise awareness about HIV and AIDS.  While UNAIDS had dabbled with Social Media marketing in the past, #PreventionRevolution represented in many ways their first holisitic multi-platform campaign, which, for those [...]

A few weeks ago Google released a searchable word frequency database called Books Ngram Viewer that enables users to pull data from 5.2 million books written between 1500 and 2008. By listing a series of words or phrases, separated by a comma, users can instantly chart and compare word usage totals  from a bank of over [...]

  If you’ve ever spent time working abroad you may find the following post amusing. For those who haven’t, you’ve been warned. Two nights ago I logged in to Twitter to…well, tweet, when I came across a very amusing hashtag on my feed (for those of you not savvy in twitter language, a hashtag [#] is used [...]

15 years ago Mark Horvath was homeless.  Today he spends his time advocating for often “invisible” homeless communities located throughout the US and Canada; his tools: a camera, a blog, and the social grid.  Thanks to three sites and a twitter account, Horvath has been able to garner considerable attention to growing levels of economic disparity [...]

Today Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged to donate half of his fortune to charity.  While this is not Zuckerberg’s first foray in to philanthropic giving, having recently donated 100 million to Newark Public Schools, the worlds youngest billionaire will now join the likes of Warren Buffet, Michael Bloomburg, and Bill Gates, among others, who have all [...]

Skype has just teamed up with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) to provide a customized low-bandwidth version of their video-chat software to locations around the world serviced by UNHCR workers. This new bespoke version of Skype will address issues related to the accessibility and reliability of communications technology that is often paramount to [...]

This past week, web 2.0 wunderkind Chris Hughes launched a new social networking site called Jumo with the goal of helping individuals  ”find, follow, and support” organizations working to address issues in their own community and abroad. Hughes, perhaps best known for his roles as Facebook co-founder, and director of online organizing for Barack Obama’s [...]

How can we use art, design, and technology to understand complex issues, make better decisions, and become more aware of the world around us? In part, through data visualization. A few weeks ago I posted an article highlighting some of the new interactive resources made available by the UNDP to help individuals traverse the 2010 [...]

Content from this post originally appeared on the UNAIDS Today Blog: Talking about a revolution: HIV/AIDS Prevention focus for UNAIDS social media initiative “More than 7000 people are infected with HIV every day. We need a prevention revolution.”  This is the message that UNAIDS used recently to launch a social media initiative across Twitter and Facebook to [...]

Accompanying this year’s 20th Anniversary HDR are a number of helpful and user-friendly resources that let individuals (who don’t need to be statisticians or economists) browse country profiles, maps, and even create their own Human Development Index. These new tools are a huge step forward with regard to making important statistical documents accessible to a broader public.